You NEED Flatpaks (Here's Why!) | Trafotin

all right kids it's time for a lesson it's time to learn about flat packs and why you need to use them flat packs is the way to go and it is going to revolutionize the Linux desktop whether you want it to or not especially since it's the easiest way to install things especially when most things that use flat packs are official packages and I'm going to be going over what flat packs are how to use them and in a future video how to control what your flat packs do so what are flat packs flat packs are quite simply sandbox packages using bubble wrap which is a program designed to sandbox applications so that they don't have full control over your system flat pack is actually a front end for bubble wrap which is a set of really complex command line arguments flat pack is really just a way of controlling that but transferring bubble wrap to work on desktop Linux flat pack is also designed to work universe personally across any Linux operating system no matter their setup so if you have an application that requires that you use system d flat pack will work on its operating system that doesn't have system D and it also works independently no matter what version of flat pack you use because the Fedora user the arch user and the Debian user all have different versions of flat pack but all of them can install the same packages together in harmony since applications are sandboxed uh flat packs download dependencies in libraries independently so that your programs can work everywhere and these dependencies and libraries are actually shared between all of your applications and the reason why they do this is because managing dependencies is one of the biggest problems with Linux gaming on Linux is a particularly difficult because gaming programs typically require not just the 64-bit versions of libraries but they also require the 32-bit versions of libraries and what happens in the future when we have things like arm or risk 5 which also have different architecturally different libraries flat pack simulates architecture so if you want to play a video game you can play a video game with all of your 32-bit libraries tightly tucked away from the rest of your system and they don't leave a mess everywhere on desktop Linux applications are given access to Demons are allowed to access other programs on your system ideally your operating system shouldn't allow this to happen but it's actually a real problem that flat pack wants to solve especially when you consider that companies like Apple and Google have already figured out how to do this through things like Android Chrome OS and iOS Linux still hasn't gotten this figured out yet I mean Windows hasn't got really gotten figured out either but the the technology that flat pack uses is built to provide an answer to this problem flat pack is integrated in all the major Linux app stores like gnome software pamac to discover and flat pack provides a containerized folder which is dot VAR in your home folder which is actually separate from all of your config files and because they're all separated from each other it's easy to find out what a file is doing to your system while you can use flat pack on the X11 display server a flat pack can't properly sandbox applications on X11 because X11 does not provide any native sandboxing whatsoever and because of this it will actually work against the security of the sandbox after all in order to prepare for the future we need to be using Weyland which separates all of our window processes from each other and then we also need to be using flat pack which separates all of our processes from one another since Linux has no sandboxing whatsoever unless you use Weyland or flat pack you need to be using something that provides sandboxing and almost every Linux distribution out there will not do this for you and there are other Solutions out there like the other Universal packaging formats which try to address this but they don't address it in necessarily the correct way so for example app Images app Images are another Universal format which are pretty nifty but they still won't sandbox or applications the same way flat pack will they just run as bulk executables like in your home folder especially when in order to get an app image you literally need to trust random people on the internet rather than using a centralized software story now I know there are things like app image Hub but app image Hub requires that you trust yet another entity in addition to the people who are packaging app images for risk people to use the way app Images work while creative because you can download applications on something like a USB drive it makes it incredibly annoying because you have to go to random websites to download things which is essentially resorting to how having people go back to the same behavior they are on when they use Windows or Mac OS when they're literally visiting random websites to download programs and we cannot go back to that it is a objective downgrade but this is only touching the tip of the iceberg app Images also package duplicate versions of libraries so if you install electron apps you now will also have duplicate copies of electron because if you install uh something like the session messenger which has its own electron to that it uses or the note taking app standard notes which also uses electron you will have duplicate versions of electron packaged in their app Images which just eat up more space and there are people who argue that a flat packs also have the same issue because they also have duplicate versions of libraries but flat packs actually compress that so any storage that the libraries take up is actually much smaller which attributions don't compress anything so you aren't downloading the full package when you use a flat pack you're actually downloading only part of the dependencies libraries that you need and then they're compressed so they don't take up as much space on your system canonical snap packages seek to solve the same issues a flat pack does but it's literally been ruined from the beginning and large in large part because of people don't like canonical for some reason uh I I mean like don't get me wrong I don't appreciate like canonical doing things like pushing snaps really hard uh using snaps as a proprietary back end forcing auto updates on people um but I would argue that the bigger issues of snap as a universal packaging format is uh snaps uh don't necessarily sandboxing doesn't necessarily apply if you use what they call late classic snaps which are apps that are like a lot older and they also require that you use app armor so if you use a distribution which doesn't have app armor so for example if you're using a red hat based system so like Fedora Red Hat Rocky Linux Alma Linux you can't actually take advantage of snap of snaps on the server because these distros that are red hat based don't actually use app armor because as they use something called SC Linux therefore using snaps on these systems is completely worthless and the sandboxing does absolutely nothing now as another note I also hate that when you use snap packages canonical will actually make a log of everything you install install a unique ID to your installation and I can do whatever they want with this information for it yes I know that they anonymize and heck they literally publish it on a website uh but the problem with these statistics is anonymized statistics will always be eventually de-anonymized and it's only a matter of time when someone writes some sort of paper study that finds out how to turn these statistics into real people and there's no way to opt out of this either you can't there's no setting that lets you get out of this you just have to accept that this will happen to you and flat pack will not do this to you no doubt uh of course everyone was going to say well let's pick something to hate um but for me it's like I don't want to use app Images because I don't want to have to resort to the same behavior that people have to resort to when they use Windows or Mac and I don't want to use something like snaps because of snaps it is capable Telemetry and it's it's for these reasons that I will just not use app images or snaps unless there's an application which specifically asks for it in every way flat packs prove that they are better and that they are for the future they don't collect any Telemetry about you they let you host and add your own repositories because they don't have a proprietary back end they don't require root privileges when you install stuff it's more secure for you to use it's more convenient for desktop users to download their favorite applications especially when most of them are packaged by the official people whereas when you go to snap Crafters or app image you might be getting a like someone else who is packaging a particular program and not the official source and flat packs also provide an incredibly powerful permission System Flat packs may be imperfect but some sandboxing is better than no sandboxing at all especially when other Solutions like app Images uh snaps and fire jail are just not sufficient compared to using flat packs especially when flat packs not makes it all easy and that's the real key thing here if something is easy people are more liable to do something that's secure and easy rather than something that's secure and complicated so we should promote the solution that is both secure and easy I'm also going to go out on a limb here and strongly recommend that you install as many applications as you can through flat packs I know there are some that don't quite work correctly but just do as many as you can in fact here's my challenge for you for the rest of your week go out to your computer and uninstall all of your applications that have a flat pack equivalent version and only use the flat pack version move your configuration folders to the flat pack equivalent folder and embrace the future and just try it out if it doesn't work for you you can always go back to doing what you were doing before and we need because we need to embrace the future and even if flat packs are not perfect which they absolutely aren't we need to be using them in the meantime because right now it's the best option we have and I will tell you right now when the next best thing comes I will let you know hit that like button and embrace the future that is flat packs and if you like this video why don't you go hit the Subscribe button alright thank you for watching love you guys see you all next week [Music] foreign

Channel: Trafotin

Views: 8,428

Keywords: trafotin, flatpak, desktop linux, linux security, sandbox, snap, appimage, dependency hell, flatseal, snaps vs flatpaks vs appimages, learn linux

Id: Jiqxdb6ZhkQ

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023